This application claims the benefit of U.S. application Ser. No. 10/826,779, now issued as U.S. Pat. No. 8,019,672, and U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/463,835, filed Apr. 16, 2003, both incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to systems and methods for providing electronic trading systems, and more particularly to trading systems that allow traders to improve prices for a particular item.
Electronic trading systems provide a platform for which traders can trade items such as financial instruments (e.g., stocks, bonds, securities, futures, contracts, currency, etc.) or household goods (e.g., old records, antiques, sports cards, etc.). In many of these trading systems, bid/offer-hit/lift processes are used to negotiate a sale of a given item. In connection with such processes, traders may submit bids (i.e., prices they are willing to purchase an item) and/or offers (i.e., prices they are willing to sell an item). A trader may respond to bids or offers by submitting sell (or hit) or buy (or lift or take) commands to the trading system. A trade is executed when a trader issues a hit or lift (or take) command in response to a bid or offer, respectively.
The prices at which bids and offers can be submitted usually conform to some sort of fixed interval or increment, where the interval is set by the trading system or dictated by the type of item being traded. For example, if a trader is trading United States Treasuries in a brokerage trading system, that trader can submit bid or offer prices that vary by ¼ of 1/32nd of a point in Treasuries up to a maturity of under 10 years, and ½ of 1/32nd of a point for maturities over 10 years and over. If traders desire to submit bids or offers that are more competitively priced than other prices, they are limited to submitting bids or offers at the predetermined pricing intervals.
Therefore, it is an object of the invention to provide systems and methods for enabling traders to improve on the price of a particular item, within the predetermined pricing increments.